Parallel
by peggie sue
Summary: /"They'd stacked these bricks together, he thinks. And somewhere along the way the wall got so high he couldn't see her anymore."/ Chris/Mariska, kinda sorta.


_A/N: Contrary to popular belief, I am not a terrible human being. I found this on my computer from sometime while ago and kind of liked the way I had it written, so here ya go. It's not Olivia/Elliot, it's ***DUN DUN* **a Chriska story. Yes—Chris, Mariska, etc. I guess this is one way to imagine why he might have left, and it's basically a conversation in her trailer sometime during the filming of Season 12. No, I do not believe that this occurred. Mariska loves her family more than anything and my crush on Peter speaks for itself. This is fiction fiction fiction, so you're not allowed to be angry at me for more than like .03 seconds. Open minds? Ok. No actual home-wrecking occurs, so, that too. Any and all feedback is loverly. _

"I just... I don't, I don't want to love you. Not like this."

"Gee. Thanks."

He looks at her, and she knows it isn't like that, she knows, but he has to explain himself anyway because she's only meeting his eyes for a half a second and then she's staring straight ahead.

"Mack- I can't, I can't keep on doing this. Living this life and knowing that no matter what, it's never going to work no matter how much we want it to."

"You know that I want it to. You know... You know, Chris. You have to."

He wants to tell her that it will be worth it. He wants to tell her that she's the one that makes him strong enough to risk it, that she's the one that can ramble for hours about leaving your comfort zone or opening your heart and that it's halfway ridiculous that now she's refusing to do exactly that. He wants to tell her to try, to go back to a place he knows she's lived in before. Maybe what he really wants is to be young again, because the two of them could have been reckless together. Good together.

"I know you love your family. Can't hurt them." He knows that. He knows that more than he wants to.

She nods, and he also knows that when she opens her mouth to speak again her voice will come out as a lisp and her chin will wobble like it does when she concentrates on sounding happy. He hates that he can know her this well.

"Chris." It's small, but it's something.

He thinks she's crying now, but he stares straight ahead. They're parallel, he thinks, as his eyes bore into the same beige wall that hers do. Always in tandem-together-but never touching. He wonders when their children will be old enough to learn about lines like that in school and really understand what it means to continue unanimously into infinity with out the slightest possibility of becoming intertwined in anything more than name.

He wants to touch her so badly. But;

"It's okay," he tells her, because these things have to be. Giving up-it has to be. "I understand. I'm trying to understand."

She pauses and a watery laugh falls into the spaces between them. "I feel like I've been in love with you since I was a kid."

Sometimes they admit things just to fill the emptiness, because not all of it can dissolve at once. It's funny, or sacred, or something, and he finds it strange that their love is so different.

"How did we get like this?" He rasps, finally meeting her eyes. "Like them?"

Them. Elliot. Olivia. For a minute, he hates them. What they represent. What they've allowed them to become.

He can tell she wants to look away again because her eyes are struggling to hold onto his. He wonders if her nose has ever been this small and he wonders why he needs—needs, all of a sudden—to brush the hair away from her forehead. He wonders when it got that long again.

"We aren't like them," she whispers, and it's too harsh for him to buy into the idea that she actually believes it. "We're happy."

He doesn't think he's ever been so angry in his life, and he doesn't know why he laughs, but he does. "I—you're _serious_? You're _serious _right now?" he seethes, and he's up, he's off the couch, he's going to pace straight into the wall and straight back again and he thinks he wants to grab her by the shoulders and pull her up too because she can't say that, she can't say those words when both of them have spent the past six years of their lives standing and suffocating and watching the bridges burn between them. Watching every last barrier crumble in the aftermath.

She jumps, her eyes widening and flicking before settling and realizing that in all of this, they're both right and they're both defenseless. He's scared her, and he hates himself for doing it, because maybe that's all this is. Maybe it's scary, it's scary in that neither of them can understand it even though they've been sitting in it, just _in _it, for so long. Too long, but it's still too confusing and entangling and hungry and _much _for either of them.

"I just—"

He can't hear her begging to be forgiven, he can't hear the _I'm sorry_, the giving up, the end. Maybe they're already doing it, but he doesn't think he can take any more regardless, so he stops her.

"No! I—_Jesus_, Mariska. You can't just, you can't just _sit _there, and lie, and tell me that you're happy in this! That _I'm _happy in this! Because I know. I know that we both have... too much, that we've both got too much to lose from this but _please_... Please don't sit there and tell me that you're happy. That you're not... drowning, or doing whatever it is we've been doing here, because _God_—I don't think I can take it. I don't think I can take it anymore, because I'm sick of knowing what I want and just—" his words are cut short by the sound of his own fist slamming into the trailer wall and he can't look at her. He can't face her anymore because his chest is heaving and he knows she's trying not to lose it and that she'll be able to finish his sentence anyway.

"Just what?" she offers, and it's halfway silent. It's begging now, he thinks, and the words are so small that he thinks they must be afraid of falling too. Love, air—it's all the same, because emptiness is uniform. "You want too much?"

He swallows. A beat passes, and he nods. She knows.

"Yeah, well, join the club." It's without humor. "I... I don't know what you want from me here, Chris," she admits, desperately, because she wants to fix it. He thinks that she'd be content with living like this, in all of this, if it meant that nothing else would change. He knows that she wants to wrap her arms around everything intangible and hold it close because she can't afford to lose anything else no matter how little it seems. She will protect this, whatever scraps of it they have left, with everything she's got. And it terrifies him.

So he is silent.

"Do you, do you want me to say that I love you? Because I can do that," she says, and her voice cracks. She opens and closes her palms and swipes at her face and can't stop moving her hands because that's how it is when she's nervous, when she's afraid. "I love you, Christopher. I do. I love you with too much of too many pieces of my heart and that kills me, because all I want to do all day is give you all of me and wish that either of us could take it."

He doesn't remember what it feels like to breathe but he thinks that it might have something to do with the too-thick air in this room and his non-functioning lungs.

"But I can't." She's crying. "I... I can't. And it's so unfair, and it's so—it's so fucking _stupid_, all of it, because I don't know where you stop and I begin anymore and I don't think that I can live my life if we're not a _we_. B-but... you have a family, Chris. You've got a wife and a daughter and a son and I, I've got all of that now too, and it's too much. It's too much to live like this with you but I... I sure as hell can't do it without you."

He wants to have it both ways, or all the ways, and he wants to keep her close any way he can. He wants to kneel on the ground in front of her and pull her against him, because she needs to stop crying like that, trembling like that. He wants her to know that for some reason he's immovable when it comes to her, that he's never going anywhere, because so much of her is always going to be the little girl with the big dreams and the tiny apartment who can't work an oven and has the predictably uncanny attachment to hot pink monogrammed towels. She's always going to have the naïve grin about her that tells the world she isn't quite from around here, and she's always going to rest her hand on her stomach like she does when she's embarrassed. She will always be the one who called him screaming from her kitchen counter after seeing a mouse on the ground, later insisting upon taking it to the park in a shoebox with a piece of cheddar cheese "for good luck."

She's been so many different versions of herself around him that he isn't quite sure when she grew up and they all blended into one. She's the wife, the mother, the child at the same time. And he is the protector. He wants to be. He wants to be everything, because whatever it is between them has changed like she has. Like he has. Whatever it is has grown up, too, but he thinks that maybe all that growing just hasn't left enough room.

He wants to make the pieces fit. He wants to, and he should, and he's sure that she would fit in his arms and her lips would fit against his the same way he would fit inside her. And he's sure that her head would fit under his chin, or onto his chest, and that their bodies would fit against one another the way his arm fits around her shoulders and their children—all of them—fit on her lap. He wants to unfill the spaces between them just to fill them again with something else, with something better, but he knows now that the walls you build together are doubly strong, the hardest kind to tear down. They'd built these lives around each other, they'd just done it in all the wrong places, and now he thinks that this is the cracking. This, somewhere, has to be where it breaks.

He needs to be able to reach her, and reach her _right _this time.

"You can," he says. "We can."

"Chris, _please_." He was wrong before. This—_this_ is the begging. This is the desperation, because she needs him to stay. She needs him a place where he can't give up but he can't keep fighting, and he hears the words before she's even thought to say them.

"I know that you don't think that you can do this. Be this, without... without me in it. But I can't sit here, every day, and need you, but not be able to have you. Or only be able to have you in the ways that kill us both."

"I need you too," she gives him. But she's not fighting either. She's not standing up, she's not looking ahead, or at him. Her eyes fall someplace between her knees, and she's stopped wringing her hands together. The nerve has left her, the fight has, the pride has. All the walls are gone between them except the ones that need to be, and he wonders how it feels to be living in their other universe, where everything is happening in reverse.

He wishes he was Elliot, because being too proud to love someone is better than being too responsible to fight for it. He wants to be selfish, he wants them both to be. He thinks that sometime down the line they must have started deserving it, but he knows that she can't change. He knows she thinks that she owes the world some cookie cutter type of perfect, and for all the times he could have told her so, he'd continued building his own.

They'd stacked these bricks together, he thinks. And somewhere along the way the wall got so high he couldn't see her anymore.

He sighs. He will be done now, if not because he has to be then for her sake. "I... Can we talk later? I know the baby's coming in a minute."

She nods. Steels herself. They'll keep on, and her son will be carried into her trailer in a while, and she'll work and have dinner and Peter will leave for the night show and they'll both wake up tomorrow morning somewhere in the middle of this life again.

He wishes as he closes the door behind them that he couldn't still hear her sniffling as she got changed into her slacks and cop clothes, and that parallel lines had the ability to jut away from one another, too.


End file.
